I, Author

Every person has a story. To some extent, we are the director, the writer, and the actors to our lives. Our choices indicate what scenes will arrive and in what order. We script our own dialogue and often coach it out of others. The private moments, the deep meaningful ones, are completely at our dispense. As we live it out, we follow Shakespeare's "As You Like It":

All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts.

Like an author about her characters, I have to wonder about myself: Where am I going? What am I doing? Who is a part of it? And so very intrinsically: Why? These are the questions I have been pondering in my heart as long as I can remember. Even as a child I knew that I wanted my life to be an adventure. Children are meant to be dreamers. There is an imagination level they have and because it tends to be curbed by time and experience, adults forget how to understand and value this gift. Childhood is the beginning, as every story must have. It is the the sweeping concepts, grand ideas, high hopes, and imagined impossibilities of the story of our life. Maturity constructs a storyboard from this and accepts that a story cannot be all highs in order to have depth. Maturity embraces adversity, frustration, growth, mistakes, and tragedy not as the end, but as the means for enriching character.

Living the adventure meant something a little different, although not wholly irrelevant, as a child. Unlimited by trivial details like finances and fears, I expected to have traveled half of the globe by this age of twenty, as well as conquering many skills such as writing, surfing, photography, bungee jumping, painting, skydiving, singing, scuba diving, sailing, para-sailing, guitar playing, piano playing, and playing with dolphins. Somewhere in that not-too-busy life, I was supposed to have already earned my bachelor's degree and be gliding my way toward a master's and doctorate in English, emphasis in creative writing, maybe double major in British literature. No sweat.

While I am still ambitious to accomplish many of these dreams (albeit somewhat modified and in a more reasonably time and manner), there are more pieces to this story than I had anticipated.

You might notice that I did not mention the producer in my introduction of roles. That is because it is arguably the most crucial role in all of this and I have chosen to relinquish that to the one who has my deepest affections. He has more experience and wisdom in managing life than I could ever hope and he has proven himself time and again as someone capable of handling my heart in a thoughtful way. Now and again we delegate roles in our story to others, allowing them to call the shots, either out of deference, humility, or fear. Eventually, we have to take those back on at some point, but with this one I do not intend to do so. It is my deepest desire (one so deep that I am often terribly afraid of it) to write, direct, and act out my life story in such a way, that it has substance enough to be produced. The one who loves and knows me better than I know myself gets the final word on my decisions and I want him to be happy with the final cut... that is exactly why I go to him in high hopes or tears: "So does this girl move to California or stay with her family in Texas? Where is the story going?"